If you saw the Wall-E movie, you may remember how people morphed into helpless blobs because all their needs were being fulfilled by something called BNL. I realize I’m a quirky libertarian, but the movie made me think about how excessive government is doing something similar to people who get seduced by dependency. This was […]

Bill Frezza of Adams Capital Management writes at RealClearMarkets to debunk claims that the current deficit is due to a lack of tax revenue, rather than excessive spending.  Using IRS data, he shows how revenues from the rich – as well as the effective tax rate on the rich – rose during the Bush years. So […]

I don’t agree with all the points in this column from Real Clear Markets, but I fully agree with the overall theme that the GOP would be wise to cut Bush out of the Party’s history. Like Nixon, he was a failed, big-government statist. The sour economy is presenting Republicans with a golden opportunity to […]

I’m still dealing with the statist echo chamber, having been hit with two additional attacks for the supposed sin of endorsing Reaganomics over Obamanomics (my responses to the other attacks can be found here and here). Some guy at the Atlantic Monthly named Steve Benen issued an critique focusing on the timing of the recession […]

A very depressing story in USA Today reveals that federal bureaucrats are making more than twice as much as people in the productive sector of the economy. Even worse, the advantage for bureaucrats has jumped from $30K to $62K during the spendaholic Bush-Obama years. At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal […]

If I was organized enough to send Christmas cards, I would take Richard Rahn off my list. I do one blog post to call attention to his Washington Times column and it seems like everybody in the world wants to jump down my throat. I already dismissed Paul Krugman’s rant and responded to Ezra Klein’s […]

Anybody with an IQ above room temperature understands that companies only hire workers when they expect to generate net revenue (i.e., the total receipts associated with a new worker are expected to be higher than the total costs). That’s why it was so reprehensible for Congress to approve a 40-percent hike in the minimum wage […]

My former colleague at the Heritage Foundation, Brian Riedl, has a column in the Wall Street Journal today which discusses the degree to which President Bush’s policies can be blamed for current deficits. I think Brian is too easy on Bush’s terrible record as a big spender, but he is 100 percent correct in his […]

According to a new poll from a Democratic firm, an astounding 55 percent of people think “socialist” is a term that describes Obama. Here’s a blurb from a National Review post. Deep in the poll, they ask, “Now, I am going to read you a list of words and phrases which people use to describe […]

Here’s a depressing chart prepared by Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center. But we don’t need a thousand words to say that the long-run prognosis for America will be grim if government continues to expand faster than the productive sector of the economy. This is mostly a chart of the Bush years, so keep that in […]